DIIA Blog

As the social networking scene continues to explode, developers are increasingly finding novel ways to use services such as Facebook and Twitter. Through the Facebook Connect technology, the developers of a web app called Aardvark seem to be onto something. Their service basically crowd sources your contacts and contacts of contacts in Facebook to help answer any question you may have. Any question. So how good would this be for students? Probably pretty good unless you are taking a test, in which case asking the Vark might not be a good idea.

For getting answers to questions stumping you, you can submit your question to Aardvark which is then interpreted by the system’s artificial intelligence system. It then sends the message out to people in your extended social network who might be able to answer your question. The question is sent out anonymously and the replies back are as well (as far as I can tell), so no question is too ridiculous. Your identity should not be revealed. A average response time is about 5 minutes. And of course an iPhone app was just released. This is an intriguing application that will be interesting to see how it matures, especially in higher education circles.

Keene

For those interested in seeing videos of the 2009 NMC Summer Conference keynotes, I would wholeheartedly suggest you follow this link to see the archived video feeds. They all are worth checking out if you have time. If you can’t see them all, I would suggest look at Kathy Sierra’s video, Marco Torres’ presentation and the closing tribute to Doug Engelbart, the creator of the mouse and other technology that we use everyday now.

http://www.nmc.org/2009-summer-conference/videos

Pat Ramsey, Principal, slash25.com. What’s your definition of social media? From participants: 1) where content is user-generated, 2) forums, 3) e-mail groups, listservs, 4) online space where people can communicate and collaborate, 5) any space that allows you to build community, 6) media away from the Web. From traditional media sources, on-line communities–broad term.

Define: Social Media (Wikipedia, Bottle PR, Search Engine Watch). Ramsey defines as the online equivalient to “The Kitchen At A Party.” Increasing number of social media sites, some are beginning to fold, being compared to the .com bubble.

Social Media succeeds: 1) people come together with little regard to geographic barriers, 2) allows the crowd of humanity to reach information otherwise unattainable, 3) sparks creativity and imagination.

SMS is the only tool for much of sub-saharan Africa. Convert text to e-mail messages and send.

Hash tags on Twiter.

Social Media steps in it: 1) when there is no method of skipping repetitive content (skip-naves, skip links), 2) when there are not text equivalents (alts) for images–social media sites tend to lean towards the heavy-image category of sites, 3) when there are little to no means of identifying the purposes of inputs, controls, and text areas.

Facebook–automatically generated link names that go on forever, have no clue what it is. Other problems: form labels. No title attributes–no way of knowing what to put where. Has no area for alts for photos. Twitter does alts on thumbnails in timeline, automatically generated by user name, so can link to other users.

Competitive market causes folks to rush stuff out without planning in accessibility. User-generated, and users are not educated about accessibility. Ex.: YouTube. Even developers don’t know–lack of awareness, certainly no testing.

Text alternative problems: thumbnails in discussion threads, images in user photo galleries, avatars in forums. CAPTCHAS–alt attributes can be problematic for CAPTCHAS as their purpose it to reduce accessibility for computer programs (robots), but maintain accessibility for ONLY normal sighted humans.

Audio CAPTCHAs offer greater flexibility, but still pose challenges to user. Difficult to understand. Possible solution: validating questions (”What color is the sky?”). When you make it difficult for users to interact, you’re not serviing your folks. CAPTCHAs have already been broken. Better to rely on your e-mail spam functions. If commercial products offer solutions, most likely Black Hat hackers already broke them two years ago.

Information, relationships, and labels are problematic. Labels must be properly associated with a field via the “for” and “id” attributes. Jaws sees title attributes used in fields.

Looked at how three social media sites do 3 major functions.  Facebook minuses: form fields unlabeled, no title attributes; audio CAPTCHAs difficult to hear; lack of alts on images. Facebook pluses: help page available regarding accessibility. Works better on mobile site: m.facebook.com. text/xhtml+xml means it works with IE, simpler version of site, easier to use for most things, faster loading, *login and other form fields still unlabeled, much easier for screen reader use.

Twitter: “What are you doing” textarea properly labeled. Images conveying information have appropriate alt attributes. Skip nav present. “Following,” “followers,” “updates” links start with number value rather than object–maybe invert them. Greasemonkey scripts (Firefox add-on, can write them yourself) available to enhance accessibility. Third-party accessible alternative. Hover function that shows links isn’t readable by screen reader.

Twitter Mobile: application/xhtml+xml will load in Firefox, not IE. No images, stripped down text, no sidebar, etc.

New solution for Twitter w/Jaws: “Jawter.” Allows you to get updates, with audial alert. SXSWi broke AT&T’s network, killed Twitter. SMS worked, however! Don’t activate “all text messages” or will kill your phone.

WordPress (.org, not .com): 2 areas of concern–accessibility of published content, accessibility of the administrative interface. Function of their CMS system. Make sure headings are correct, forms labeled properly, colors aren’t out of whack–test with the same steps you do for any Web page. Templates then build pages, propagating accessibility code throughout all pages.

Administrative interface: can be edited just as theme templates, but edits will be lost when you upgrade. Post title input has no label or title attrib, no skip nav, Visual Editor uses ifram with HTML page for textarea–body of the post. Good: alt-z jumps straight to the body of the post, however, this should be made known to users, using a heading or label that’s positioned offscreen. A few other keyboard shortcuts, but the code doesn’t tell the screen reader.

Developers know that things can be better. The developer community is making strides–distributed, back-channel development: TPG-notifier. WAI-ARIA.

Iterate: find the accessibility hooks in your social media app of choice; share your findings so others don’t slog through unnecessarily–you may find people have written workarounds and fixes. Communicate with developers, submit patches if possible.

Panel discussion with

From the session description–let’s see how these experts dice it up:

There are no cheat codes for community. No Charles Atlas shortcuts to make your pet project the one to rule them all. Want people to think you’re awesome? Be awesome. This panel promises a bullshit-free look at how you might tune out the jibber jabber, tune in to those who matter, put your head down and make your online service a little bit more epic each day. We’ll dissect Bike Hugger, Photojojo, Metafilter, and other examples of Web charm for what *you* can do. Today, and tomorrow. And the day after. Which is how you will become what you want to be.

Not about being different, or for difference’s sake. Our outreach should be more audacious. We need to lift our game. Do more epic things. #roux

I like your face. Don’t know if this is the right one, but great thoughts on education.

Whose work means something to you? Who gets you excited? On an ongoing basis? Gupta is doing stuff that’s smart and fun, and alive, and likes to share with you.Give side projects some front & center time. Apprentice yourself to someone else’s thoughts and ideas. Focus on delicious details. Growth is about doing the small things all the time. What are the little things you can do that have huge benefits? Maybe by tweaking a little bit? Go long. We produce and ask for copious amounts of data. What do we do with it after the project is over? It’s what happens at some point on the horizon. XFN–micro formats. Think into the decade. Share. It’s important–make things good for partners, people you work with and for, help each other get there.

Byron: Bike Hugger. Collects everything they do out there and put it on line. Focus. Stay on message. Jim Coudal says have fun with everything you do. Celebrate all the diversity and all the things that you do. They stream out on YouTube, other places, to say “we’re doing a lot, we want to share it with you. We went to Beijing, now we’re at SXSWi, and we have a lot of neat things to share. We’re having a good time, hope you enjoy it, we’re really being who we are and out there and sharing it.”

Urban ride tomorrow with Lance Armstrong’s bike show–Mobile Socials. Cool idea. Created a community of people who share similar interests. Noticed that the bike rack was full at a recent conference. Trying to capture that and talk about bike culture as being the center of creativity. Finding like minded people to get together and talk about it (while riding bikes!).

Get Satisfaction: people power customer service. Customer support community. Many folks participate around products. Some of the participants are employees at the companies. When they started thinging about it: core principles: their mission. An interesting break in the way people lived around their products. Connect with people who share cultural objects, collect, communicate. When you try to talk to a large company, have a very different experience and outcome dealing with them. No reason people should operate differently. Teach companies how to get value out of connecting with joy. Thus Get Satisfaction. People powered customer service.

Ahmet: his theme is experiment and find out what first works. Wanted to get 100 photographers to shoot photos in Times Square for 24 hours. Couldn’t get a permit, so they pitched tents and experimented. Didn’t leave the traffic island for the night. Didn’t drink much–no toilets Jelly: missed having other folks around to share things with. Thought they’d just invite folks to come over to their living room and sit around with their computers and work for the day. Featured in NYTimes. Strangers jellying. Started site showing people what they could do with their digital cameras that’s different. 2X/wk newsletter with all the most interesting things to do. They now have a store–not a camera store, but sell 12 items they think are exciting. His experiments get great press. Photo tours–gather people together–e-mail people, say grab your camera, we’ll do a Photo Safari. Do it in different cities. People actually showed up. Bike Hugger teams up with Photojojo. A lot you can do to make money if you make it actually interesting. You become your own client: everyone’s dream. Take a seed and wrap wonderfulness around it. Keep it going, maintain, add to the tribe.

Cristine: How do you make yourself interesting over the long haul? Brain Traffic: Smart, useful Web content. Finally. Not an experiment. Grew the business slowly over time. People have great ideas, they’re engaged, they want to share them. Content strategy. Plan Create.Publish.Govern. Sustainable awesomeness. Even if you’re experimenting, there’s a little bit of a plan for it to occur. Companies: who do they want to share? Why? What are the outcomes you want? Then as you’re planning, can begin to think about postpublication. Continually garnering feedback, sparking and exchange. The care and feeding of your epic shit. If you decide to launch a blog, create a network, throw a party? What happens next? Maybe nothing. But if you have a way to sustain the good stuff. The Goods,New goals.Self knowledge is the next stage to engage your customers in new and engaging ways. No good being a flash in the pan if you can’t back it up. Has to be real. Look for new and continuing ways to inspire yourself with new goals.Self-knowledge: Understand your limits. What can you really commit? Who can you pull in to help?

Courage is the biggest thing. Twitter: how far is your reach? Is your reach falling off? As your visibility grows, you gain more influence, people become engaged, focus about what you know, what you grow, what you can bring back to the table day after day. It’s OK to have ADD on a bike ride. There is so much diversity, but if you can stay on the subject–like BoingBoing. Hit in different ways, but the same subject.

Experiment and commitment don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Can bring the goods while continuing to grow.

How do we know it’s working? What are the numbers for on-line marketers? Knowing the score of the game? Brian: out of their way to not mention things. It’s confusing to know what matters. If you make an assumption that one thing matters, you miss out on the other variables. Now what you measure, but how do you avoid measuring? How you turn love into money? Some people call it prostitution. Mike Q put up a sparkle t-shirt design. Was told can’t sell on Flickr, then others got involved, spread all over the Web for weeks. Is that being successful? Still a playpen.

Ahmet measures everything they do. The store has a matrix: love over time, money over time. Everything that person does has to predict how a product will do. Continually tweak.

Isn’t experimentation a luxury in these economic times?

Run the opposite direction–don’t try to squeeze everything out of people. Don’t limit yourself–figure out where the dead ends are to help find the epic stuff that works. What you can do to begin is to talk to people like they’re human beings. That’s hard core experimentation. Buck the last several decades of “we are insurance, we must speak like we’re in insurance.” Begin with small things–monthly e-mail newsletter–no crappy overwritten content. Make it human. This is huge, radical in large corporations. Bringing the human interest to stilted corporate brings the love to the people, who bring the money. Love is money, love is money. Move from transactional model to a relationship model. Assume you’re going to have a long-term relationship with this customer. You’ll have transactions, not always money transactions, but each one must be human.

Do not hijack relationships and turn your friends or clients into pimps and prostitutes for marketing’s sake. You’ve establishes relationships for several reasons, don’t crunch it down to the point of seeing people only as someone who is going to buy something. No reason to confine good relationships no matter if it’s a huge corporation. Just because you’re big doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat me like a human.

The corporate structure measurements are the wrong measurements–the leave the human out altogether. The concept of “the big reveal” is boring. Just do it. Marketers thinking they have to “move the needle.” Do you really have a quantitative measurement? Social media is about impressions, good will, NOT selling. “Marketing is Now a Two-Way Conversation.” What do I need to know? The corporate Web site is the LAST place I’ll go to find out if I trust you enough to engage in a transaction with you. Concept of brand: a collection of perceptions in the mind of the user. Corps want to control that. It’s over. Marketing is dead in the sense that it continues to use old concepts. Need to use concepts that help you grow larger and larger. Difference between “we love bikes,” and putting together something that shows how much you love bikes.

Traditional marketing tries to shortcut. New marketing takes a lot of work–research, experimenting. Marketing defined as getting more people to find out more about what interests them. Don’t ignore the people inside the corporations who have a lot to say, and will get hurt if they’re not listened to.

Model this behavior. Find stuff you think is cool, share it with others. Hopefully someday you will have the influence to say “this is the courageous thing to do. Go out there and be awesome.”

Wikirank.

More and more institutions of higher education are turning toward social media sites such as Reddit, del.icio.us, and LinkedIn to reach faculty, students, and staff on the internet. DIIA Blogger Keene Haywood posted a link to Michael Wesch’s speech on YouTube.

Ran across a new term vis a vis social media in the classroom: creepy treehouse. This is defined by Jared Stein, Director of Instructional Design Services at UVU as a place, physical or virtual, built by adults with the intention of luring in kids. More specifically to the university classroom is this def: “Any system or environment that repulses a target user due to its closeness to or representation of an oppressive or overbearing institution.

Mr. Stein provides a more in-depth discussion on his blog flexknowlogy.